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The Social Sciences & Humanities Librar Annual
Report for Academic Year 2001-2002 Tammy Nickelson Dearie The staff of the Social
Sciences & Humanities Library (SSHL) continued to build upon the
success of previous years’ work. The
primary focuses were on services to users, development of collections,
and the creation of new structures to provide support for staff to achieve
their goals. Statistics continued
to reflect changes in user behavior and the staff worked to refine services
to meet new challenges. Concerns
and challenges echoed those of the entire UCSD Libraries: the need and
desire to provide more or different services with the same number of
staff, the demand to serve a growing student body, the need to adapt
to a culture of rapid change, and an increasing demand for new technology
without the support of a robust technical infrastructure to support
this demand. A major focus for SSHL
continued to be the provision of services to users and the adoption
of technology to meet the department goals.
There were ongoing efforts to identify new types of services
and new methods of providing these services to our users as the department
continued to see decreases in the volume of activity at traditional
service points (see statistical summary for details).
New services, such as eReserves and GIS, were adopted and grew
at a rapid rate. Listed below are several key accomplishments of SSHL
this year. Services took the forefront this year with the
hiring of an Assistant Department Head for Reference, Instruction and
Outreach and a Director of Access Services.
Both key positions in the provision of services, the incumbents
brought new concepts, ideas and visions for services.
While many of these services are just beginning, they go a long
way in creating a new sense of direction for the Library. ¨
Continuing
efforts – as the staff of the SSH Library looked toward new services,
they continued to provide a wide array of services to support the users
of SSHL. Services included the basic provision of reference service,
including night and weekend service from the Reference Desk, the Information
Services Desk, and the Current Periodicals Desk.
Instruction, both one-on-one and in classroom settings, continued
and grew. New databases and indexes were introduced or
migrated, instructional sessions were developed and taught, and documentation
in support of new systems was updated.
Circulation services were offered seven days a week, five nights
until ¨
Electronic
Reserves –officially launched Fall 2001, eReserves provides undergraduate
students in all disciplines and graduate students in the humanities
and social sciences, access to reserve material at their desktop. The service was rolled out softly, but a dedicated
and enthusiastic following has already developed. The number of eReserve courses grew dramatically
over the course of the year. ¨
GIS
instruction and outreach – with the hiring of a GIS Specialist in August
2001 the service has grown with incredible speed.
From basic classes in GIS to specialized instruction in the use
of GIS software and related spatial technologies, the service has grown
across the campus and beyond the scope of the social sciences and humanities. The management of the
SSHL collections also continued as a focus point this year. Collections
were reviewed, weeded and moved. Weeding
projects at the Annex continued, as well as development of a pilot weeding
project that will be expanded to impacted collections in the Tower in
the coming year. Discussions on collection management in the digital
age surfaced as well as discussions about what makes a “research” library.
¨
The
government documents collection was removed, compact shelving built,
and the collection reinstalled over the summer of 2002.
Use of the collection shelved in the Annex declined during the
project due to the physical volumes being
shelved off-site. ¨
Weeding
and consolidation of the maps collection began in preparation for the
eventual relocation of the collection within SSHL. 2.3 Staff
and Organization Development Organizationally we continued
to redefine our management and committee structure within SSHL with
the end goal of creating management groups and committees with defined
purposes, ability to make decisions, and with authority to carry out
those decisions. In the ranks,
we concentrated on creating opportunities for growth and acknowledged
our strengths. As a library, we participated in, and often
took the lead, in reviewing services and policies. Key accomplishments are listed below. ¨
Reorganized
Access Services to accommodate the transfer of Ron Joyce, the manager
of the SSHL technical computing
support unit. In the spring of
2002 Ron was transferred to the Software Engineering Department in recognition
of the systemwide public service and technical support that he delivered. Public service computing support for SSHL was
transferred to Systems Department and SED. Remaining computing duties
were absorbed by Greg Ferguson. Assignments
within Access Services were reallocated to existing managers. ¨
As
part of a committee review process, four committees were disbanded with
duties reassigned to existing groups or staff.
The SSHL Public Services Team was reconstituted as the SSHL Management
Team with representatives from Access Services, Collections, Government
Information, and Reference and Instruction.
The new structures removed duplication of work,
created better representation within the library, and allow for more
efficient management decisions. ¨
An
Alternative Work Schedule Task Force was charged to explore the feasibility
of allowing alternative work schedules by all staff in SSHL. Alternative work schedules were seen as a means
of employee retention and the ability to expand services beyond the
normal 8-5 time frame. After
a 6 month pilot period, the recommendation of the task force to continue
offering alternative work schedules was endorsed by the library ¨
At
the request of staff working the public service desks, SSHL staff encouraged
the preservation librarian to reconsider the food and drink policy. The policy has been revised to allow bottle
water and drinks in approved coffee mugs.
SSHL staff also participated in a proposal to install a coffee
cart near the Geisel Library. ¨
SSHL staff played a lead role in re-instituting LSST responsibilities.
Priorities included planning and delivering disaster training
and the preparation of new draft guidelines, modeled after those recommended
by ALA, for UCSD Libraries safety, security and emergency procedures. The focus of SSHL for
the coming year will continue on four fronts: ¨
Services
to meet new needs – declining statistics for traditional services continue
to be a concern. This year we
will continue to review and evaluate effectiveness of existing services,
develop new services as needed, and end services that no longer meet
users’ needs. ¨
Space
planning – a major focus will be to concentrate on space planning, both
to allow for growth of collections and services as well as to create
space that serves user needs. The
balance between space for collections and space for users will be addressed. ¨
Instruction
and outreach - new cultures and models to support instruction and outreach
will be explored. Outreach to
faculty is seen as a prime means of attracting users to the library. ¨
Organizational
effectiveness - continuous examination of the internal organizational
structure and priorities, especially in light of the UCSD Library goals. Our challenges and concerns
mirror our goals in many ways. The
two that have the largest impact on staffs’ ability to carry out their
work are technology support and organizational effectiveness. Without strategic planning in these areas, time
is wasted, frustration created, and progress impeded.
¨
Reliance on technology
support – in an increasingly fast paced society the desire to change
rapidly to meet the technology needs of users creates tensions among
public service providers, users’ needs, and departments that provide
the information technology support.
We must find solutions to balance the need to move at a rapid
pace with the requirement to provide a secure, stable and critically
needed IT infrastructure.
¨
Organizational effectiveness
– many staff in SSHL spend more than half of each day in committee meetings.
While committee meetings allow for a formal means of communicating
and sharing ideas, they also consume valuable time.
Staff complain that many committees are duplicative or have no
real work, but are reluctant to give them up without another means of
communicating. In a profession that
relies on communication, new ways to communicate, share ideas, and make
decisions needs to be defined.
¨
New goals – any one of
the new goals in the UCSD Libraries Strategic Plan could be a full-time
assignment for each person in the library.
How we prioritize the goals, what we give up, what we add to
our existing assignments will be an issue.
Clear leadership from Administration about priorities is needed.
¨
Staff recognition – finally,
but certainly not least, is the concern for formal recognition of staff
positions within UC. As the library with the largest number of represented
staff, adequate compensation is an issue that must be addressed.
Beyond the basic humane reasons for rewarding
staff adequately, the lack of adequate compensation impacts our ability
to perform basic duties. Recruitment,
which already consumes a major amount of staff time, means that we cannot
move ahead, or certainly not quickly, and sometimes not at all. |
Appendices
They say that numbers
speak for themselves. It is what the numbers say that is not always
clear. As SSHL continues its almost decade long merge
from three separate libraries/departments into one, we continue to investigate
and refine statistical methods. Services continue to grow in the expected
areas such as gate counts, circulation and new services such as Circuit.
Changes in other services, interlibrary loan for instance, reflect
changes in the acquisition of digital materials and the use of Request.
Other statistics remain elusive for a variety of reasons. EReserve
activity is reported librarywide. What
is the impact on SSHL staff and users?
New methods of tracking will need to be investigated.
Instructional activity remains murky in definition and grows
in leaps and bounds with new staff or new monitors. Consistency needs
to be developed in order to document a baseline from which to grow. Despite the imprecise nature of statistics,
they do document trends in services and user patterns that will provide
information for meeting our goals in the coming year. |
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* Note: Intersession
numbers were included with each quarter beginning 2000/2001 |
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Funds to enhance holdings of Middle
Eastern and Islamic Studies holdings, as well as Dance on Video, Dramaturgy
(the new joint Ph.D. program with UCI), and the new M. Education program. Purchase of parts 4-5 of the microfilm
set "Renaissance Man: The Reconstructed Libraries of European Scholars,
1450-1700" to support the History of Science program and research
in the Sociology and Literature Departments. Purchase of Parts 2 and 3 of "Women and 'the Orient'" of the microfilm
series "Colonial Discourses. Series One; Women, Travel and Empire,
1660-1914" to support the History and Sociology Departments, as
well as research conducted under the auspices of the Critical Gender
Studies Program. Papers of Derek Freeman, a leading ethnographer of 20th century research and field papers documenting the Pacific Islands.
The addition of display cases in the SSH Library
has allowed for new opportunities to engage the user. Below is a list of the displays that were showcased
this past year. Banned books,
(Fall
2001). New Books in SSH, (Spring
2002). If Television Turned Me into a Vegetable, a Good Book Fertilized
My Roots,
(Summer 2002). http://sshl.ucsd.edu/staffpicks/ |
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Last Updated
October 9, 2002
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